Moi had the great pleasure of attending ’30 Years of Japanese Fashion’ at the Seattle Art Museum. It was simply a stunning show. The fact that 100 pieces of exquisite haute couture were exhibited in one place for the public to see was amazing. That is what museums do, they amaze us with things few of us could acquire and many of us would never see. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ are museums.

Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.
Jerry Saltz

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
Henry James

“In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart’s compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.”
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

“Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.”
Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life Of The Natural History Museum

“The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.” Chesterton, Gilbert K. on museums and galleries

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.